AMD’s Puma pounces; misses red-hot netbook market

AMD unleashed its own substantial mobile updates at Computex today with the …

AMD took the wraps off its new "Puma" laptop platform at Computex today, demonstrating a multipronged product the company hopes will win it ground against Intel's Centrino. AMD's mobile market share has long been a weak spot for the company, even in the days when Athlon 64 and Opteron were stealing design wins out from under Intel's Netburst-based processors.

Puma is the first laptop platform AMD has released since it bought ATI, and the combined companies are betting that the emerging synergy between their respective product lines will entice buyers in ways current Intel products cannot match. Santa Clara won't be the only force to overcome; AMD will also have to draw attention to its new Puma-based products at a time when small notebook and "netbook" designs based on Nano, Atom, and Tegra are soaking up the headlines.

Puma's brains

The Turion X2 Ultra processor (codenamed Griffin, pictured below) at the heart of Puma is a tweaked version of AMD's earlier Turion X2. Both chips are built on a 65nm SOI process, but the new X2 Ultra offers double the L2 cache (1MB per core, up from 512K), supports HyperTransport 3.0 for a total of 14.4GBps of bandwidth (up from 6.4GBps), and incorporates several power-saving features that originally debuted on Barcelona. Northbridge, CPU 0, and CPU 1 voltage can be adjusted separately, and the CPU's HT 3.0 interface can be dynamically reduced from 16 lanes to eight—or even powered off altogether.

AMD also claims that the Turion X2 Ultra's memory controller is better optimized for mobile use, and that the chip sports an improved data prefetch mechanism. While Griffin does incorporate certain power-management aspects of Barcelona design, however, the processor architecture itself is derived from K8, as we discussed in our in-depth feature on Puma.

A chipset for Puma

As for Puma's chipset, the RS780M, it's based on AMD's well-regarded 780G and incorporates many of the features of that design. ATI's newer SB700 provides southbridge functionality, while the chipset's integrated graphics are built around ATI's Radeon HD 3200. AMD claims that its HD 3200 is a superior solution to anything Intel is currently shipping, and that seems to be a safe bet; there's a huge performance gap between AMD's 780G and Intel's G33/G35 chipsets.

The RS780M also supports the Hybrid Crossfire functionality built into its desktop cousin; customers who opt for an RS780M-based notebook will have the option of adding a second GPU and running the two together. Unlike the current iteration of 780G, RS780M will be capable of switching the discrete GPU off on-the-fly via a feature AMD refers to as PowerXpress. High-end users/gamers interested in ATI-powered mobile solutions should also keep an eye out for ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 3800 GPUs, as these parts offer a substantial performance boost over the current Mobility Radeon 3600 series.

Taking the GPU out of the notebook

Speaking of high-end graphics, AMD has one further trick up its sleeve. For most of the past two decades, the visual quality and capability of any given laptop has been constrained by any number of factors, including weight, cost, power consumption, available screen size, and fundamental limitations on display quality. Many of these factors are finally being addressed, but a consumer who wants to balance an occasional need for a high-powered graphics solution against a general desire for long battery life may still have trouble finding a notebook that meets both needs. Technologies like PowerXpress are a partial solution to this problem, but why not go a step further, and eliminate the need for a discrete GPU within the laptop case itself?

AMD plans to take a shot at liberating the discrete GPU from the notebook form factor with its ATI External Graphics Platform, for XGP. As the name implies, XGP is a full-featured graphics card that would sit outside the notebook in its own, separate, enclosure. The XGP would connect to the laptop via a PCIe 2.0 x8 external connector (4.0GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth). All of the XGP's cooling requirements would be handled by the enclosure; power would presumably be provided by the external PCIe 2.0 linkage. The RS780M chipset is already designed to take advantage of this feature, but notebook OEMs will have to build the appropriate connectors into their designs, while ATI and its partners offer the equivalent external modules.

Puma is a major initiative from AMD, and a comprehensive refresh of the company's mobile product line, but AMD has a long struggle ahead of it when it comes to building on its low mobile market share. Intel has long held the high ground in this area, and AMD's previous attempts to dislodge the company have proven largely ineffective. Furthermore, the market isn't exactly focused at the moment on the >12" laptops Turion is aimed at. Atom, Nano, and the 7-10" devices they power are currently the hot topic, and Turion is not designed to fit within this space.

How much of a problem this turns out to be depends on how popular these new netbook/MID products become. Standard notebook form factors will continue to dominate sales in the near future, especially in the enterprise, but the netbook market could prove problematic for AMD to the extent that such devices begin to eat into mainstream notebook sales. At the moment, AMD lacks an equivalent product to Intel's Atom or VIA's Nano. Sunnyvale could, of course, develop its own architecture from scratch (or attempt to adapt current IP to the market's requirements), but any such effort will take time. For now, Puma is impressive, but AMD will have to stay on top of the development of the netbook market very carefully, or risk missing out.